The web did not turn 30 years old four days ago | Hacker News Reader

The web did not turn 30 years old four days ago

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9 pointstmhrtly7 comments

Four days ago this post hit the top of hacker news [1]. It goes to show how easily misinformation can spread - the correct date was even in the article. I'm as guilty as everyone else for taking this in.

Shoutouts to tobr [2] who noticed - and rurban who posted similarly [3].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25485651

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25486398

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25487207

I’m conditioned to let these anniversary things claim what they want, since they’ve started becoming arbitrarily long events. Companies will do things like “the 25th anniversary of x product,” and use it as marketing for as long as a year.

Plus, Wikipedia links to an archived CERN page (read: not vandalized) that reports in a timeline widget that the first web server went live at CERN on December 20, 1990. So, through lack of research, this attempt at misinformation wasn’t actually spreading a complete untruth.

Rather unethical of this researcher fellow to test to see if they could publicly shame people. No IRB would ever approve this kind of "research"

"I wanted to see how many people would..."

This is what every researcher says to themselves and is exactly why real researchers at real research institutes are subject to human subjects IRB reviews.

What are you talking about? Why wouldn't an IRB approve of this "research"? Also, IRBs are not the panacea for how research should be done. They're designed to protect the university legally more than to protect participants from harm.

Regarding designing or using sociotechical systems like Twitter, see Brown et al. (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2858036.2858313) for good discussion and provocations on why this is the case.

Part of the reason for IRBs is of course to protect the institution. The other is to protect the subjects. I also don't recall saying that IRB review was some sort of "panacea". Please don't present clearly false claims like that.

Any real IRB board would see that this research clearly contains potential harmful outcomes to participants as a result of making public examples of them for the researcher's amusement. No ethical researcher "publishes" results without some attempt to shield the identities of the subjects. Sure, sometimes they screw that up, but revealing the identities of "researched stooges" seems to have been the primary intent here.

I must obtain IRB approval to conduct any research, even show people simple web/social content. Sometimes it is fast tracked for sure, but EVERYTHING that involves human subjects goes through IRB review at every institute/university I have ever worked with.

I don’t really see it as shaming people, more just misinforming them. Whether that makes it ethically okay is indeed another question. I imagine the researcher chose the ‘lie’ deliberately so it wasn’t too dangerous.

I would agree, up until the point that she bragged about getting people to spread her misinformation.

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